Page 75 of The Shattered Rite
He considered her a heartbeat longer, then added, almost as if against habit, “When the air turns vinegar, don’t cut high. They open low.”
She filed it before she could stop herself. “Why tell me?”
“You don’t need another new scar,” he said simply. “Not tonight.”
Vaeronth murmured in the warm weight of her mind.He prowls. But his blades are sheathed—for now.
Eliryn let a sliver of tension go. Not trust. Not yet. Just the notch that keeps a bowstring from fraying. “If I see you again… friend or foe?”
He tilted his head as if considering.
“If I wanted you dead,” he said, voice gentle as a confession, “you wouldn't have the breath to be asking questions.”
He stepped past at an angle that didn’t put his back to her, close enough that she felt the calm of him, the unhurried pulse of someone who didn’t need the dramatics of danger to be dangerous. As he moved, he spoke without looking. “Center of the hall. Avoid alcoves with lime dust—the ones that breathe. And don’t let your left hand carry your pride.”
She almost smiled. Almost. “Noted.”
“Try not to die, Eliryn,” he called over his shoulder. “I’d find that rather… anticlimactic.”
Eliryn held her stance until her breath obeyed. The sword steadied in her grip where he’d told her to shift it; the cloth was warm in her palm. Against sense, something in her eased by a hair.
“He is not kindness,” she said under her breath.
No,Vaeronth agreed, heavy and intent.
Eliryn stood frozen, the sword trembling faintly in her grip.
“I still don’t trust him.”
Good.
She turned slowly toward the corridor, but her gaze lingered on the place he’d disappeared, on the swirling darkness still softening back into silence.
She tried to steady her breathing, to pretend the encounter hadn’t shaken her. But it had.
More than any monster so far.
Because she could brace herself for claws and fangs and illusions that wanted blood.
But Malric…
Malric was something else entirely.
Something she couldn’t name.
She turned away, willing her thoughts into stillness. If she refused to dwell on the impossibility of magic and monsters, or how naturally the sword had fit her hand, she would not linger on Malric either, or wonder what part he played in these cruel games.
Let him play his game. She'd win hers.
Interlude 5: Malric
“A blade remembers the hand that forged it, even when it’s forgotten what it was meant to protect.”—Virellen of the Black Sigil
There are worse things than being born a weapon.
Malric should not have lingered.
The maze breathed and bent around him, a living thing of stone and shadow. Most walked it with dread. He walked it like memory, silent and sure, his boots never scuffing, his breath too shallow to echo.
